The Pit

I

Grandfather goes with canaries and blind ponies down the mines where God’s lamp spins on his helmet. In the evenings, stripped to the waist, he washes in the kitchen sink. After supper, in the parlor among small glass animals and wax flowers, he injects himself with insulin, then knocks back a bottle of Newcastle Brown.

II

He gave me a book with the faces of sinners eaten by fire, told me stories of the Devil met down the pits, a black man, pretty as a curl, collecting souls. Thunder, he said, was the Devil dancing overhead in his clogs, clogs the miners wore for work or for clog-fights that left their shins black as the coal that coursed through lungs and veins.

III

One Hogmanay the Devil knocked at our door with a lump of coal in his hand. I screamed. “It’s only Uncle Jack, first-footing,” said my grandmother. But I’d looked through the burnt cork and saw that face crushed by his motor-bike, blood flowing down the Shields road into the gutter and the blackness below.